William Shakespeare

Whereas the ballad-opera (based on Shakespeare 's The Taming of the Shrew) was misogynist, as its title suggests, LP 's prologue was vehemently pro-woman.

These pieces convey vividly personal memories of people, places, and events from her childhood, and the impact her famous writer father had on her early life. She writes: my memory is a sort of Witches'...

For this production she made some cuts, and revised the catastrophe or plot-resolution. She later said this was the only one of her plays that she would dignify by the name of tragedy.

The arborist re-reads Oliver Twist alongside their partner's lectures and urges the partner to consider discussing the musical form of the novel (a request accommodated, as the academic threads it in alongside Auld Lang Syne...

EH enlarges on the terrible state of the Irish peasantry, with unemployment surpassing four million and many deaths from starvation. She comments on the Vagrancy Act of 21 June 1824; on the fact that prison...

An odd couple on holiday from England (Stanley Williams, his Jamaican immigrant parents' my-son-the-banker, and Jessie O'Donnell, a singer, a foundling raised by nuns in Leeds) drive haphazardly across Europe towards the Middle East...

The contents include descriptive and melancholy sonnets, satire, autobiography, and politics (including a poem on the horrors of slavery, addressed to William Wilberforce , and another about the sorrow of a woman whose lover has...

The plot of this novel is a version of a romance archetype: poor but deserving girl confounds all expectations by marrying up. Elizabeth Bennet is the quintessence of the witty and resourceful heroine who had...

The play is a Senecan tragedy, written for the closet, not the public stage, though it is worth remembering that upper-class circles reading or performing such plays were connoisseurs of the highly dramatised masque...

Housman named the influences on his poetry as non-contemporary texts: the border ballads, Shakespeare 's songs, and Heine .

EJS is wary of the transformations of poetry: this apparition / A rainbow truth altering for every eye. The real King Richard II , who died in obscurity after a life of ruin and negation...

Turning from history to literature, EPL notes that whereas in life women are assumed to be weak, in literature they are depicted as and admired for being strong, wilful, and assertive. The only exception she...

The action, which takes place in a magic forest, fantastically enables second chances which nevertheless fail to be better exploited than the first choices were. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls this the most...

This is unusual: a compliment from a Frenchman to Montagu, whose Shakespeare criticism was anti-Voltaire and therefore anti-French.

This first dialogue concerned the Baconian controversy. CS 's father was given to harping on his belief that Sir Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare . This is the position taken by Smedley's Victorian...